A few poems as spring awakens the mountains

Since the year 2000, I have written going on 750 Back Then “columns” for The Smoky Mountain News. I am enormously proud of that association. Many of the “essays” in my books have been filtered through SMN to their benefit. Even though I have always thought of myself as a poet, only four or five of the BT pieces have contained verse.

As SMN editor Scott McLeod has noted (for my benefit) on several occasions: “A little bit goes a long way.” Newspapers are not the vehicles of choice for poems.

Nevertheless, it’s that time again. These poems are part of a collection of 35 essays and 25 poems — as well as artwork by my wife, Elizabeth Ellison — that will be published this summer by The Natural History Press (a subsidiary of The History Press located in Charleston, S.C.). They are simple poems. But they are the best that I can do and I want to share them with you. I almost forgot to add that the title of the collection is Near Horizons.